In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic
about his lack of it.

So, Fallout 76 is a thing that is happening and this thread has discussion of it, but before that was announced it was the general series thread. If you want info on the older games, scroll to the picture of Ron Perlman's face below.

Fallout 76 - Brotherhood of Goon - This is the thread for goons who want to join other goons in asking other players if they have stairs in their house and probably shooting at them.

Fallout 76! The beta is out now! It's Fallout 4 but with other people and even less of a plot! Build settlements, get loot, do like a dance animation over a deathclaw's corpse or whatever!

-

Slap-fighting...slap-fighting never changes.

Right, so a quick primer for anyone who has somehow never heard of the series, or who maybe just wants to relive the irradiated magic. As usually narrated by Ron Perlman: the world ended in nuclear hellfire in 2077, humanity sucks, war never changes, but every once in awhile an exemplary person comes along to set things right. Or make it worse.

**MODDING**

For some inexplicable reason, PC gamers really like modding Bethesda games to 'fix broken quests' and 'create new gameplay' and 'add naked Final Fantasy characters to a sex dungeon.' If any of that strikes your fancy, the two modding threads are below:

Also worth noting that a bunch of the older PC games were released in a terribly broken state, so if you dive into those its actually worth installing a bunch of patches just to get them working properly. No Mutants Allowed is actually a pretty great resource for this:

Released over twenty(!) years ago, and taking place in 2161 (84 years after the Great War) this is the story of the Vault Dweller who left her/his home in a search of a water chip. It blended the aesthetic of Road Warrior with a dash of 50's future retro, and was widely praised for the amount of choice; you can play anything between the saint of the wasteland to a child-murdering raider to a drooling, literal retard and the game will accommodate that decision. And by accomodate, I mean actively punish you for playing anything other than an agile, well-intentioned, fast-talking gunslinger, but usually in a pretty funny way. The most mind-blowing part for me was when, halfway through what I thought was your standard RPG fetch-quest plot, I was kidnapped by a random mutant, dragged halfway across the world to meet the endgame boss face-to-face, and had the choice to just end it then and there by agreeing with his decision to takeover the world.

Available on GOG and Steam. Features extremely janky 90's PC RPG gameplay.

Pro-tip: Tag Small Guns+Speech+Lockpick your first time through, boost AGL and INT as high as you can, and select Gifted.

Fallout 2

Black Isle, 1998

Released just a year later and taking place eighty years after the original. This is the story of the Chosen One, the tribal descendant of the first game's protagonist who left her/his home in search of a GECK. Fallout 2 took everything that made the first game great and added in more of it. Seriously, this game is loving huge. There's a town that you find about midway through the game's plot, New Reno, that has more quests than the entire first game alone, and its not even important to the plot! If you saw it on the world map and skipped it, you would still have a fully fleshed-out 50+ hour RPG on your hands, that's how much content this game has. It's also notable for being the weirdest game in the series. Talking animals, pornstars, ghosts, time travel, it gets kinda ridiculous. It's my faaavorite.

Available on GOG and Steam. Features extremely janky 90's pop culture humor.

Pro-tip: Tag everything you tagged in F1 your first time through; being smart, well-spoken and good with small arms will carry you through most of the game. Lockpicking isn't as useful, and Science actually comes in handy here and there, so it can be a tossup between those two.Pro-tip addendum: The beginning is pretty tedious, as you're forced to use unarmed or melee attacks for the first few areas. In Gecko, there's a pipe gun in Vic's house and a 10mm in the caves near the rat king.

Fallout Tactics
Micro Forte, 2001

I've never played, but if you loved the broken, unbalanced turn-based isometric combat of the first two games are you in for a treat! The first spinoff in the series, it follows a new initiate to the Brotherhood of Steel as they move through the ranks. It has a few features no other game in the series does; squad-based tactics, multiplayer (okay, this was true before 11/14/18), and the ability to play as various wasteland creatures.

Available on GOG and Steam. Only partially canon.

Pro-tip: Playing as a roving pack of phantom dogs is a viable strategy.

Fallout Brotherhood of Steel

Interplay, 2004

The first of the series to get a console release, fans see this one as the real Fallout 3. I'm just kidding, like five people played it. Rest in piss, Interplay.

Available on PS2 and XBox.

Pro-tip: Drink BAWLS, found wherever caffeinated pisswater is sold.

Fallout 3

Bethesda, 2008

The first in the series that most people played, and the reason you can now buy Funco vault boys and key chains and poo poo. Taking place 200 years after the war and the first of the series set on the east coast, this was Bethesda's soft reboot. This is the story of the Lone Wanderer, only child of a scientist who left her/his home to search for them. It recycles a lot of the same plot points of the first two games in a kind of slapdash way and leans hard on the 50's retro future aesthetic that was only hinted at prior. It also centers more around the karma system than any other in the series, to the point that most of your companions are locked to a certain good/neutral/evil karma level and the game's DJ constantly talks about what level of Wasteland Jesus/Satan you are.

Available on PC, XBox 360 and PS3. Features extremely janky FPS gameplay and an ending so bad that they created a DLC to retcon it away.

Pro-tip: This game doesn't have the same traps as the early ones where you can accidentally make a character too lovely to survive your first combat encounter, so just do whatever. Boost your INT for a ridiculous number of skill points if you wanna finish it with every skill maxed out.DLC Pro-tip: Don't play Mothership Zeta. You think it's gonna be bad and it's even worse, even if you loved the rest of the game. gently caress, it's bad.

Fallout New Vegas

Obsidian, 2010

The greatest RPG of all time (until the Witcher 3 came along). Taking place four years after F3, this ones goes back to the series west coast roots. This is the story of the Courier, a courier who was shot in her/his head and left for dead in a shallow grave in the Mojave desert. Developed by a lot of the same people who made F1+2, its basically an improvement on Fallout 3 in every way. There's a lot less dungeon-diving and a lot more playing various factions against each other through clever, well-written quests with multiple outcomes. I could write a million words about this game (and I have, see the old FNV thread) because it is so good. Just skip everything else and play it.

Available on PC, XBox 360 and PS3. Features the same janky FPS gameplay of F3, but with some technical improvements (iron sights, damage threshold vs. damage resistance, etc) and such a wide variety of weapons that nearly any playstyle can be fun and effective.

Pro-tip: Buy the DLC. Unlike most games that just kinda slap a random quest or new location onto an existing game, all the DLC in New Vegas links together with an over-arcing plot that ties back into the main game thematically. Well, not the Gun Runners Arsenal, but that one adds a Nuka-Cola sign you can beat people to death with, so buy it anyway.

Fallout Shelter

Bethesda, 2015

I put this here so people would laugh and go "man, gently caress you" when they saw it. You're welcome! But seriously, this is a free little resource management cell phone game about building a vault. There is no plot, but after the initial release they did add a bunch of little quests where you send some of your dwellers to go shoot things to get loot.

Available on iPhone, Android and tablets. Also received a release on PS4 and XBone later, so you can see the mediocrity in glorious HD!

Pro-tip: Do not spend money on this game. Microtransactions are bad, kids.

Fallout 4

Bethesda, 2015

The latest in the series and the first to have decent FPS combat! Taking place ten years after F3, this is the story of the Sole Survivor, a pre-war parent who gets roused from a 200+ year cryogenic sleep to go in search of her/his kidnapped baby. Like F3 it goes hard into the 50's retro-future aesthetic, but unlike F3 it drops the karma system entirely. In addition to the normal running, gunning and questing, the big new addition is the settlement system, which you can ignore entirely or Minecraft away to your heart's content. There's an overall lack of non-radiant quests and very little in the way of branching dialogue, but there are some notable bright spots (Far Harbor, the Silver Shroud, companion reactivity, that drug dealer quest that starts in the upscale bar in Diamond City) and its the prettiest game in the series to just walk around exploring. Last year they added the Creation Club, a series of paid mods of varying (generally low) quality.

Available on PC, XBone and PS4. Features another settlement that needs your help, General.

Pro-tip: If you find the game far too easy as I did, I actually do recommend Survival difficulty. It adds hunger/thirst/sleep meters, various diseases, makes both you and enemies do more damage and eliminates fast travel and the ability to save anywhere but at a bed.

**DLC**

F3, FNV and F4 all have downloadable content of varying quality. At this point they've been out long enough that you're best bet is buying the GOTY edition of any of them in a sale, but for those of you who bought the base game years ago and are just getting around to it and you only have a few bucks in your pocket and want to spend it on more Fallout, here's a brief synopsis of all of them:

Fallout 3

Operation Anchorage This standalone DLC adds a linear VR adventure through snowy Alaska, where you'll fight pre-war caricatures of the invading Chinese army and then stumble into a room of overpowered loot. Like, so overpowered that its literally the best weapon/armor in the game including all the other DLCs, so unless you want to breeze through combat I suggest saving it for higher levels.

The Pitt This standalone DLC adds in the city of Pittsburgh, which is relatively unchanged from modern day. But really, the Pitt is kind of a great. It's best not to think too hard on the shades-of-gray-but-stupid-if-you-think-about-it plot too much and just enjoy the cool rickety urban treetop city the raiders hang out in and the ruins where you'll spend far too long collecting ingots. This one is best done at an early level because most of the rewards you get make for some decent (and nice-looking) mid-tier armors and weapons.

Broken Steel This is an actual expansion instead of a piece of side-content that lets you play after the game's original ending, and mostly revolves around the Brotherhood's mission to destroy the Enclave once and for all. It also adds a new level cap (30 instead of 20) and a few new sidequests of varying quality. The original F3 ending is so stupid that this DLC is drat near mandatory.

Point Lookout Another standalone DLC, but probably the biggest of the bunch. It adds a swampy island with a decent main quest, a huge amount of sidequests, some likable characters and cool setpieces. It might be as good as F3 gets at not rehashing old F1/2 plots while also not sucking.

Mothership Zeta Hey, look at that poo poo, all blasting aliens on a spaceship with lasers! That looks pretty fun! It's loving not! The last piece of F3 is a standalone DLC that has you abducted and fighting your way off of an alien ship. Its basically several hours of a bad corridor shooter with all the high-end bullet sponge enemies from Broken Steel and Point Lookout but none of their redeeming qualities, and to top it all off they added a 100 audio log collectathon that you have to complete all at once because you can't return once you finish it. Haha, gently caress you!

*

Fallout New Vegas

Unlike in F3, the DLC in New Vegas actually expands upon the plot of the base game and ties together as well. Each one also adds +5 to the level cap and introduces new perks, which will get you all the way up to Level 50 if you get them all.

Dead Money Kidnapped, stripped of all items and outfitted with a bomb collar, the Courier is dumped into a poisonous city in the middle of nowhere and forced to work with four other sociopaths to break into a pre-war casino. This is the closest the series gets to survival horror and is it ever divisive; you'll spend more time running away from invincible holograms and shielded radios then actually fighting anything, and what combat is there is made more difficult by enemies that won't stay down and limited weapons. Honestly, the gameplay is more to be endured than enjoyed, but the characters are all absolutely fantastic. Oh, and as much as you might want to, don't take the first [Barter] check against Dean Domino. That fucker will hold it against you for the rest of his life.

Honest Hearts Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior Jesus Christ? This DLC has a lot to say about faith and innocence, but if you're not into that there's still a lot of fun to be had running around Zion National Park fighting it out with tribals and the local wildlife. Can be done at early levels as the enemies scale (somewhat) but beware, giant cazadores exist and they will gently caress you to death.

Old World Blues In the first ten minutes of Old World Blues, you discover your brain, heart and spine have been stolen, and an insane screaming brain-in-a-jar accuses you of flailing your penises at him. It definitely sets the tone for the rest of it, which is a wacky romp through a playground of failed science experiments, talking stealth suits and the occasional bit of sudden, unexpected pathos. This one is definitely recommended for higher levels, because it pretty much throws respawning enemies at you nonstop (Avellone did this deliberately to gently caress over anyone playing sneaky sniper, the optimal build). Even if you've put no points in melee, it's recommend to find the protonic inversal axe straightaway and start hacking away.

Lonesome Road The end of it all. You finally get to meet Ulysses; the shadowy figure who set your entire journey in motion, a man only briefly mentioned, a man who you were destined to do legendary battle with, a man who will say a million words at you over the course of the next several hours. Extremely thin plot aside, this DLC abandons the freeform exploration of its three predecessors and features a linear dungeon crawl occasionally interrupted by tedious monologues. This is the only DLC where you can come and go as you please, which is useful because (1)there's nowhere to stash loot and (2)it is extremely high-level and only gets more difficult the further you travel. This one's for anyone who finds the rest of the game too easy, and depending on your choices during the ending will unlock between 1-3 absurdly difficult, highly-irradiated combat arenas.

Gun Runners' Arsenal This one doesn't add any quests or new areas, just a lot of unique weapons and new weapon mods for sale across the Mojave. The new uniques are all ridiculously expensive and are basically there to sink money into after you've hit that point in any RPG where currency becomes meaningless, but the mods shouldn't be overlooked: make the starting laser pistol actually useful, turn the chainsaw into an absolute beast, and more!

Courier's Stash This is just all the preorder bonuses from when the game first came out and gets unceremoniously dumped into your inventory at the beginning like a bad mod. The only bits worth mentioning are the canteen (keeps your water topped off) and the mercenary's grenade rifle (because decent explosive weapons are hard to come by early in the game), the rest is mediocre armor/weapons you'll stop using early on.

*

Fallout 4

Automatron If you thought Fallout needed more robots, this poo poo was made for you. Adds a new mid-sized dungeon, a new mega-sized dungeon, a new raider faction (with crappy robot parts armor instead of crappy scrap armor) and most importantly: mix-and-match robot buddies! Cobble together your own robot death machines to act as companions stronger than any in the base game, or make them settlers, give them different voices/names/whatever.

Wasteland Workshop It's a workshop...in the wasteland! Wow! Yeah, I don't know. This one adds cages to catch raiders and deathclaws and dogs and cats, and if you have ranks in Wasteland Whisperer (you won't) you can even have friendly deathclaw guards, which...eh? Is kinda cool? Even as someone who tinkers around with settlements a lot I had trouble putting the effort for this one. I would only grab it as part of the GOTY edition.

Far Harbor If you get one piece of F4 DLC, get this one. Actually, if you only have time to play a small amount of F4, beeline the main quest until you meet up with Nick Valentine, then take him with you to Far Harbor, because it's better than almost anything in the base game. A full-blown expansion set on the mysterious, mist-shrouded island of Far Harbor, what starts as an investigation into a family's missing daughter turns into a delicate balancing act between three different factions who all wish the other two would just kinda gently caress off already.

Contraptions Workshop Another workshop pack, with even more useless garbage for your settlements! Actually, the ammunition press could be useful but still...eh . Also features weapon/armor displays so you have something to do other than shove them in a chest, I guess.

Vault-Tec Workshop Another workshop package, with even more useless garbage to-okay, actually that's not fair. This one adds a new location (an unfinished vault) and a short questline to unlock some different vault experiments to inflict on your poor settlers. If you're buying any of this piecemeal and absolutely have to get a workshop pack this is the best of the bunch, but still...eh

Nuka-World The second expansion and the only other one worth spending money on, Nuka-World launches you through a hell-gauntlet of high-level enemies and into the role of the new raider Overboss. Unfortunately, the title is kind of a misnomer, because much like becoming the leader of the Minutemen, you still do all the work yourself. As the new boss, you're tasked with reclaiming an old amusement park from whatever high-level enemies have taken over residence and then giving it one of three raider gangs working for you. And then when you're done with that, you have the option to start taking over Commonwealth settlements too, kicking out or enslaving all the farmers and setting up raider outposts because...profit, I guess?

Creation Club This isn't an official DLC per se, more like a paid mods list Bethesda added to the game after wrapping up the season pass. There's very little to recommend here since the bulk of it is just weapon/armor/pip-boy reskins or random weapons/outfits of dubious quality, but recently they have at least started adding creations that have a small quest attached. If you absolutely have to grab something though, the backpack is pretty nice.

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That's about the gist of it. Talk about old games! New games! How much you hate Todd Howard! How much you love Fisto, the robot who fucks! By the people, for the people! Ad victoriam! Spurs that jingle jangle jingo! FALLOUT!!

Michael Dorn as a super mutant talking about hoping that hooker you bought him didn't get pregnant. "It takes a while for us super mutants to get the ahh.. juices flowing again."

I put sooo many hours in fallout 2

I've put a lot of hours into F2 and have never actually made it to San Francisco. There's just so much stuff to do in Vault City, New Reno, the NCR and all the places inbetween that I never make it to the last leg. Shooting your way out of each casino after betraying 3/4 mob bosses is absolutely amazing though, even if each turn takes 5+ minute of bums and hookers fleeing in terror when you get down to the ground floor.

In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic
about his lack of it.

I actually really enjoyed Somerville Place, that one where the guy is living with his two kids in the middle of a swamp on the edge of the Glowing Sea. Not just because it's funny that he's an absolutely terrible dad whose closest neighbors were an unstoppable sentrybot, a high-level raider sculptor and several mirelurk hunters, but the whole area had this oddly rustic charm to it.

If you're playing survival the only settlements really worth maintaining are Hangman's Alley (closest to the city), Sunshine Tidings Co-Op (closest to Nuka World) and whatever that one northeast farm is that's near Far Harbor. Everything else is too much of a slog to get to.

I haven't played it in a year but there never seemed to be a point to spending money on Fallout Shelter, even after adding in the parts where you can actually explore stuff.

Yeah, I still dabble in Fallout Shelter when I'm bored on a plane or whatever and with the added quest system the game throws lunchboxes and pets at you pretty frequently. There's really no reason to ever pay real money for any of it, especially when that's money you could be using in the Creation Club to buy horse armor (do not actually buy the horse armor)

My protip for FO4 is also don't spend money on it. It's such a huge step backwards from FONV in writing and gameplay and charm.

I agree FNV is a better game than F4, but if you played F3 and liked running around shooting at super mutants and combing through post-war buildings for loot and didn't mind the mediocre plot, F4 is absolutely a better version of that all around. Picking your way through the ruins of Boston and fleeing down alleyways after accidentally stumbling upon a raider stronghold is fun as hell and the weapon/armor crafting actually made you excited to find a cache of wonderglue and coffee cups.

I also find it funny that after all the post-F3 "yeah, but what do they eat" criticisms they made an entire game mechanic out of creating a series of sustainable farming settlements.

Wolfsheim fucked around with this message at Jan 29, 2018 around 19:13

Fallout 4 is a fun open world game with a fairly satisfying core gameplay loop, even if it's a downgrade from previous titles in several crucial aspects. (You know, story, dialogue, reactivity. The rpg bits.) Ultimately, I had a good time playing it, even if the final impression was somewhat marred by the lovely endings.

Also, I hope the base-building never reappears in any of their games.

Base building is definitely here to stay. Not only is it the main focus of three of the five add-ons released, they keep churning out new Creation Club content based around it.

I actually hope the next thing they do is integrate it properly into the plot, with actual characters and quests and such. Building up Sanctuary to rival Diamond City is pointless when the game never acknowledges it, but building your own Diamond City could be interesting. The way they try to have it both ways by being divorced from the rest of the game is worse than not having it at all (which would be fine, but is not gonna happen).

I'm also the guy who spent hours meticulously decorating his tiny Novac hotel room in New Vegas though, so take my opinion on it with a grain of salt.

In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic
about his lack of it.

For real though, Fallout 2 is silly as hell but take out all of that (well, you'd have to rewrite talking deathclaws living in a communal pacifistic society being a major plot point, but the rest can be taken out easily enough) and it's still solid and still enormous on a scale that dwarfs the first game.

It also explores themes that the rest of the series barely touches on, like the divide between citizens/non-citizens in Vault City and all the different ways that can gently caress you over (certain companions not being allowed in, the danger of carrying a fake day pass, etc).

In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic
about his lack of it.

I can attest to both F3/NV on the PS3 being terribly broken. In one part of the map of F3 you couldn't even look in a certain direction without getting severe lag and graphical errors, and I even ended up blowing up Megaton hoping to free up some memory or something by killing off a bunch of superfluous NPCs (it didn't really work).

F4 on the PS4 has been pretty great comparatively. A few crashes here and there, but almost all of them occurred during that very first vertibird trip you take with Danse to go to the Prydwen.

In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic
about his lack of it.

Were there actually downsides to settlements lacking resources, though? Other than settlers whining about it I didn't really notice a difference, and it's not like defenses amounted to much anytime a settlement was attacked.

The leveling system in 4 is horrible. In fact, I would say 4 is actually a very weak entry in the fallout series, even compared to 3.

This is a common sentiment, but...not really? Both skew hard against the formula especially compared to something like FNV, but 4 is definitely a more refined/improved version of 3, to me.

Skill checks: These weren't in 4, but they were barely in 3. I think there's maybe a half dozen in the entire game, and the 'speech check as a percentage that you can reload' is a dumb design decision present in both.

Karma: F3 has a really stupid karma system. FNV basically ignored it but F4 just took it out entirely, which was the right call.

Weapons: F3 has absolutely dogshit weapons. For small arms, there's literally two shotguns in the game, three pistols, and maybe four rifles? F4 still suffers from a lack of variety, but the addition of various legendaries and being able to mod weapons extensively helped. Turning a lovely bolt-action pipe rifle I found in the very first area of the game into a high-end silenced sniper rifle that carried me through my first twenty levels was great (again, nothing on the absolutely enormous amount of weapons in FNV, but still an improvement over F3).

Main quest: F3's plot was you fighting the same super mutant army from F1 until the villains from F2 show up and you fight them instead. You are railroaded into working with the BoS and then are given the option to betray them at the end for no reason. Working with the Enclave or any other faction or even not helping Liam Neeson is never an option, even if you spent the last twenty hours of the game being a genocidal cannibal slaver. In F4, the Institute isn't really fleshed out but you can work with them if you want, or any of the other factions. At any point you're allowed to secretly betray or just outright murder the leaders of every faction except the Minutemen. The sheer amount of choice compared to F3 is huge, even if it's not as nuanced or interesting a choice as FNV.

Side quests: This is tricky because both are filled with absolutely terrible sidequests. Like, sure, the Wasteland survival guide questline is great, but so is the Silver Shroud, or the Cabot house quests. Conversely, for every nonsensical insane garbage quest like the kid in the fridge, there's the stupid subway vampires from F3. This one might be a draw, honestly.

Companions: Companions in F3 have about as much personality as companions in Skyrim, which amounts to 2-3 introductory lines before you hire them and then generic combat barks for the rest of the game. Companions in F4 are some of the most fleshed-out NPCs in the game (okay, not Strong or the Institute guy, but everyone else) and react to the plot, have personal quests, etc. Nick Valentine is a better character than basically anyone you meet in F3.

Wolfsheim fucked around with this message at Jan 31, 2018 around 02:47

Except the character has already done stuff in the universe. In prior fallout games and most RPG's your character has done nothing before you create them (because they didn't exist before creation). The courier has a history attached to them beyond the player's control.

This isn't exactly a new concept from Obsidian. Alpha Protocol played with the fact that you were not creating a character, but rather choosing the approaches the existing character would take to achieve his goals.

Yeah, this is dumb. Each Fallout protagonist (other than 3) has a history, even if it's a pretty vague one where you lived a relatively unremarkable life in a vault/tribe/Boston suburb.

The Courier also doesn't actually go "huuurrrr what is the NCR " all of the NCR dialogue choices are framed in a way that can be read as "tell me what the NCR is up to in this area because I'm trying to subtly gauge how people feel about them in this area."

What exactly did the MC do before being created in any of the other games?

- FO1: nameless unimportant figure in a vault
- FO2: nameless unimportant figure in a tribe coming of age
- FO3: sperm in a nameless unimportant figure in a vault's nutsack

FO4 is the only one beside NV that bucks this trend...and incidentally happens to be the one criticized as having little player agency and basically a predetermined character arc.

How is 'nameless courier who delivered packages for a few years' any different from 'nameless tribal'? They both have just as much backstory, possibly more in F2's case because you actually end up interacting with some of your family members (your whiny cousin, your bitchy aunt, etc).

In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic
about his lack of it.

Nah Bethesda is good at what they do, because if they weren't they wouldn't make a comically large amount of money doing it and someone else would be doing it better to make all the same money. GTA games aren't really comparable because their big open world only exist to shoot the thing or look at the thing, there's no real interaction beyond that. It's basically nothing like Skyrim/etc outside of 'world big.'

Its just that 'giant world to explore and loot with barely serviceable combat and dozens of mediocre quests that moslty exist to get you out there exploring and looting' isn't really what Fallout has ever been about before that so the two clash pretty hard.

It's more than just "delivers packages" as evident from this conversation; before the player takes control he's helped blow up a town, make an enemy out of one of its former residents, accept the job of delivering the chip, and get shot in the head. If he was the player character even back then, you'd figure that you would have a say in those events.

I'm surprised this is even a point of contention, considering how minor a detail it is, and how cleanly a cutoff exists with the head wound + recovery.

It's a totally arbitrary distinction, though? The Chosen One interacted with her/his fellow villagers throughout childhood, watched her/his home get ravaged by famine and chose to undertake the Temple of Trials, whereas if they had really been the player character they would've hosed off to New Reno before the game ever began to start an illustrious career as a pornstar/boxer/mafioso, because that's what I would've done.

The only truly blank slate is F3, because you define all the details of your life from birth on, everything else fills in some backstory (and honestly, 'had the same job for several years and then got shot before the game began' is pretty bare bones, especially compared to something like F4 where a huge chunk of your life is firmly established in the first five minutes of the game).

I feel like another big issue with FO3, NV, and 4 are that they aren't as gross as FO1 or two an extent 2. There's nothing really like the floaters or Master. Centaurs I guess but that's really it. They play down everything else for the wasteland, which is a problem, since there isn't actually a wasteland anymore if we keep going forward in time with the games.

I feel like this is partially engine limitations, too. Can you imagine the jank and framerate crippling slowdown if they tried to do the Master's pulsating flesh walls in Gamebryo?

Wolfsheim fucked around with this message at Jan 31, 2018 around 20:53

Bethesda has shown they're a way better publisher than they are a first-party developer. they really need to leverage some of the talent behind other properties they've produced, and have them make some kind of all-stat team for the next fallout. FO5 being written by the Prey team and having the game mechanics of the DOOM team and etc. seems like it'd be a pretty kickass game.

or it'd be an mediocre Frankenstein of mishmashed ambitions, but that's not any different from what they're currently producing. might as well give it a shot!

I'm curious if DOOM would be as sleek and fluid as it is if they had to render a static open world that keeps track of every coffee cup you decide to hoard. I suspect that the reason we don't see any real Bethesda competitors in the open-world cup-hoarding genre is because of how hard it is to keep track of all that bullshit in-engine. Like, Witcher 3 may come the closest, but it doesn't do that thing Bethesda games do where you can walk into some guy's house, steal the forks (and only the forks) and start knocking all the food off his dinner table, then go home and make a shrine out of all your stolen forks in the shape of a giant ur-fork.

Yeah that's dumb. The courier and the player aren't separate identities. The courier is me. You could roleplay a character where the bullet to the head caused a dramatic personality shift but I never did and didn't feel like the game was suggesting I should have.

It's especially funny because some of the choices you make at the beginning are things like gender and race. I guess that bullet was really something when it transformed the straight white man Courier Jones who is good at pistols into the black lesbian Donna McCourier who can punch a man so hard he explodes

90% of games do that, sadly. I do find it a bit annoying that the Vault Dweller and Chosen One are canonically male in later games since I never pick the generic white guy option in any game that allows otherwise, including Fallout. It's kinda unfortunate that F2 acknowledges this by making every other junkie or creep in the wasteland hit on you, though.

In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic
about his lack of it.

I didn't mind the voice acting

I mean, I minded that the male VA was kinda bad, but the lady VA did a good job and the way they made conversations into little cutscenes was a nice touch, especially when Piper decided to tell me heartfelt backstory while in the background Diamond City guards were getting murdered by raiders while we didn't help.

I still prefer the silent-protagonist-with-combat-barks style a la Dragon Age Origins, but I feel like that era has passed AAA games by.

nah, though. if the general trend of increasingly civilized settings continues apace, FO5 is going to involve your character living a normal post-post-apocalypse life where you have to prepare for your job interview as a computer programmer for the NCR and fret about whether or not you can afford your apartment rent after the landlord just raised the rate to 1200 caps. you'll enjoy exciting things like eating lunch at a functional restaurant and paying for a ride on working public transportation.

low-tech/no-tech might not be what the original FO was, but it'd be more interesting than everything more-or-less returning to 20th century normalcy (with the exception that there's inexplicably a metric fuckton of pre-war trash still piled up on every street corner).

Eh, so far Bethesda has had no problem just keeping things post-apocalyptic even when it barely makes sense (though they did try to kinda handwave it away in F4 by mentioning that the effort to establish a unified government fell apart and Institute paranoia kept everyone isolated since), so I wouldn't worry about playing the next game as a Google employe. And really the Fallout games have barely covered like 5% of the actual US, plenty of opportunity to make a new era that's still totally hosed up for <reasons>.

OTOH, do you think they'd record every single PC line of dialogue again in the orc, khajiit and argonian male and female voices, or just cut them from being playable characters?

Any character flavor you like, so long as it's white male human.

Ehh, they're being pretty cagey about the next Elder Scrolls ("the technology won't exist for years!" or some bullshit) but even Dragon Age Inquisition had four voices, two male/two female. It's not inconceivable they could do a similar thing and have English accent/American accent/Vaguely eastern European accent and call it good. If I recall correctly beast races shared the same voices in Oblivion, as did most Orcs/Nords

None of those have any real impact on the game if you choose to ignore them.

Not necessarily; Automatron adds the Mechanist hordes and Rust Devils to the random encounter spawn pool, which can cause some large and out of control battles when they show up in certain areas. I'm a fan of it, though.

To be honest my advice is to not buy Fallout 4. As much as I've played the crap out of it and enjoyed parts the game is horrendously buggy and the writing is frequently awful. Maybe get it if it's on sale at some point; that's when I snagged it. With how bad the quality is I'd have been pretty cranky if I paid full price for it.

After the clumsiness of the first project purity quest, I don't know if I can continue on to Waypoint Zeta. Dad, get off the intercom and help me. Why not give me the fuses right away. I'm stuck in a pipe and the enclave are landing. Why can't I open this door. Ugh.

Point Lookout was okay though. I liked the redneck models.

It's probably too late unless you have a recent save, but there's a neat trick during the whole 'bad dad kills self and Enclave guys' cutscene that even works on consoles; if you go into third person mode, stand right up against the glass and rotate the camera, you can loot Colonel Autumn's unique 10mm pistol and his baller jacket, which I rocked for the rest of the game. You can also loot James' clothes, which is only noteworthy in that it inexplicably weighs like twenty pounds more than every other vault suit in the game.

The Pitt rules but it sucks a lot that if you manage to successfully fight and defeat the slavers in the foundry that you can't just force your way to Ashur and win in an alternate way that way; it's one of the hardest things to do in the game and fun as hell to improvise your way to victory but the game just puts up a wall and says "no stop it, do the quest".

Haha, I never even considered trying this. And yeah, the plot and choices are dumb; if you go the good route (which presumably most people did) then you save a bunch of no-name slaves, kill all the unique characters and then the slaves...still keep working at the mill and living in their crappy ground-level slaves' quarters? It's just feels really unfinished, like they wanted you to side with the slavers instead (which I did every other playthrough).

It almost feels like a prototype for Nuka-World with all it's funny named raiders and confusing expectation you'll side against the slaves, but I really love the level-design and the fact that all the loot it gives you is correctly balanced instead of ridiculously overpowered (Anchorage) or underwhelming garbage for the level you're supposed to play it at (Point Lookout, Zeta).

My memory might be wrong but didn't Fallout 4 have a bunch of generic villager NPCs without names? I was gonna say Bethesda always wants even their minor pointless NPCs to be actual characters to some extent, which is the way it is in TES games (excluding guards), but I don't think they kept doing it in Fallout.

As far as how small cities feel in modern Fallout games, I feel like New Vegas is up there in how disappointing it feels, though granted this can be solved with mods opening up the Strip and Freeside.

Yeah, New Vegas biggest problem is probably how disconnected the Strip is. Not just physically either, the Three Families all have questlines that never intersect with any of the main factions or each other and none of them even get and ending slide. A minor point since the rest of the game is so great about everything being interconnected both literally and thematically but since it's in the name of the game you do expect it to play a larger role than it does.

In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic
about his lack of it.

Take Nick, but feel free to swap him out for Old Longfellow (the new Far Harbor companion, his cabin is a settlement) when you take a break from the main quest to go roaming the island. Guy makes a great hunting and drinking buddy.

It does a handful of thugs better in my opinion. It makes D.C. feel like it actually got bombed to pieces since you can't explore the ruins without using the metro tunnels. It also makes super mutants much more intimidating during the early game, whereas in 4 they are just raiders with slightly more hp. The environments look more fitting to me as well, since it has mostly 20th century Art Deco architecture and much less of the ugly "future world" scifi architecture. The combat still blows rear end though.

I don't know if I've ever heard the lovely subway system that everyone universally hated navigating as a selling point before now. I somewhat agree on super mutants but honestly they stop being a threat in either game by like Level 8 so it's kind of a wash.

I'm not sure the Institute plot could have been fixed really. IMHO synths flat out don't belong in Fallout. They don't fit the visual/thematic/lore style of the Fallout universe at all. They're robots from some 80's or 90's movie dropped into a world where robots are supposed to be 1950's/60's Lost in Space style. Whoever wrote the script outline had obviously just watched Blade Runner before making GBS threads all over Fallout, the same way they binged Lord of the Rings before making GBS threads on Oblivion and turning the cool jungle Byzantium of Cyrodiil into Middle Earth.

I really wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Cain/Avellone/Sawyer & assorted Obsidian guys had a late-night bitchfest about what they really think about Bethesda's 'stewardship' of Fallout.

Ehhh, is the Institute really that out of place when Big MT exists? Strip away the cartoonishness of the Think Tank and it's basically the same thing; a collection of scientists living in an underground bunker for so long that they've lost their way and are now just churning out experiments for the sake of it. They both even have crazy blue sci-fi magic teleportation as a significant plot point.

I'm also not sure synths are any more absurd or tonally dissonant than invincible hard-light hologram guards, even if Obsidian's writing is a lot better about making you take a ridiculous concept seriously

In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic
about his lack of it.

Actually now that I've made the comparison I realize what a missed opportunity it was that they didn't make the Institute director an insane screaming brain in the vein of the Think Tank or the antagonist from Point Lookout instead of your lame son.

I'd say Big MT is fine because it's explicitly pulp. Brains in jars, robo-scorpions!, and animate corpses in spacesuits. It's easy to see it painted on the cover of AMAZING STORIES! It's also sort of isolated off in its own little DLC realm as a stand-alone story. Synths and the Institute are Blade Runner/Terminator, as the core of the story, played completely straight and completely stupid.

I'll admit I wasn't a big fan of the hard-light holograms... or the bomb collars.... or uh... Dead Money on the whole.

I feel like if they'd been given the opportunity to integrate the DLC into the base game more they absolutely would have had Big MT come across as this shadowy evil that steals people away in the same vein as the Institute (up until you actually meet them).

Wolfsheim fucked around with this message at Feb 14, 2018 around 21:36

In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic
about his lack of it.

Nah, the F4 companions are pretty good other than a couple duds (Strong, Preston, that Institute guy) and it's great the way they react during various quests. Nick, Deacon and Codsworth are especially charming.

They're nowhere near FNV, but I'd put them above any of the F1/F3 companions and even most of the F2 companions (the albino deathclaw suuucks).

In an age of affordable beauty,
there was something heraldic
about his lack of it.

It's funny, FNV has the best writing in the series and that mostly extends to companions, but my most loathed companion in the entire series is Veronica. It's basically just Felicia Day making random dumbass quips. It probably wouldn't be as grating if she was an unimportant side character like Lily but she's such a huge part of both the main BoS plotline and factors into Dead Money with Christine (one of the best companions) that she's just there constantly, being terrible.

Honestly BGS just needs to be shut down. Zenimax/Bethesda are pretty drat good as publishers/owners (since they own Arkane, id, etc.) but Bethesda Game Studios is just bad and they'd do better to license out TES/Fallout to folks like Obsidian.

I agree, the smartest business move would be to shutter the studio that made Skyrim and Fallout 4 to focus more on Prey, a game played by myself and maybe twenty other people.

And while we're at it I want Bioware to only make isometric turn-based RPGs again, Chris Avellone to be put in charge of all Star Wars related media going forward, a remastered release of FFVI and a pony.

In the game you end up brutally murdering the only person who really ever seemed to care about you in a revenge fueled blood lust - but he did steal the car and got surrogate mom and kid murdered. After that you just tear off into the desert with your recovered car. But if you went through and did all the side missions all 3 strongholds, the fire cultists and Gastown are left sitting in a much better position than when you first found them.

Ehhh, I wouldn't really say you (Mad Max ending spoilers) murdered him so much as you drove the car he considered his life work off a cliff and he decided to die with it rather than escape. What I always found odd about the end of that game is that the post-credits gameplay doesn't just drop you back at the point before the last mission, but shows a kind of alternate reality where you, your mechanic, and the mother and child all end up happily alive and co-existing together at the Friar's hangout.

Anyway, I enjoyed Mad Max but the upgrade system was awkward and late-game combat is almost the exact same as early-game combat, just with more shivs and shotgun shells. There's also no reason outside of competionism to ever get most of the upgrades for all of the bases, or even all the upgrades for any given base. I don't think the game even acknowledges when you max out a base either; no cutscene or rewards or anything.

I'm surprised that there are still so many boarded up buildings. Map designers that just copy paste art assets forever are a dime a dozen in video game development. In fact I heard stories were bus loads of these people were called in late in game development for some games just to spam the world full of stuff.

On Fallout 4. Is the .44 revolver viable end game?

Weapons gradually fall off I noticed. Eventually you get to where the 50 cal sniper rifle with all related perks and sneak attacks perks still end with raiders needing two or three stealth head shots to die. Even the deliverer that is a viable mid level weapon for all purposes does very little.

Oddly enough the shotgun seems to be viable against all enemies way past level 90 even if at just low to mid range.

Not sure about regular variations, but I lucked into a two-shot .44 once and it remained my best weapon deep into level 50+ range. It was pretty funny to be able to just walk into a super mutant stronghold and just casually gun down everyone, even on survival.

If we accept Tactics as canon (its not that bad guys!) Then there existed mutants smart enough to be able to try to find a solution to mutant sterility, and with how long-lived mutants are it's entirely possible that they might have found such a solution before dying out.

Lou Tenant/Attis might have found the cure in Vault-Tec's "lol gently caress you we're not going in our own test hovels" personal vault, he didn't survive his cronenberging long enough to make gently caress.

So I wouldn't say V Dweller necessarily saved the wasteland so much as avoided making green and blue the dominant skin colors.

You don't even need to accept Tactics as canon for a super mutant that cured super mutantry, that's one of the more questionable plot points in F4.